Greetings,
We wrapped up our county fair about a week ago and I have spent some time sifting over my thoughts and the thoughts of others before putting up this post.
If I were going to do a few things differently, for one I would have gotten more
John McCain bumper stickers because we sold all of ours ( a few were accidentally given away but oh well!) and I would have had more paraphernalia to sell. We probably could have raised more money selling more pins, t-shirts, etc if we would have had them in supply.
A few members reported that the local Dems came up and were very confrontational, considering that this came from volunteers who were older senior citizens, this was very UN-classy on the part of the Democrats. One local democrat came up acting friendly one night to tell us to close our booth (he was working for the fair as a security person) and tried to get us to say something about
Barack Obama and race. He was attempting to bait us and for future reference, my own family history includes one Union recruiter / soldier and I have an uncle who was in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and I am very proud of both of these things. I really could care less about a candidate's skin color, I will vote for anyone, African-American, Hispanic, Asian, etc., these are not things that concern me. I will vote
for the conservative every time! If
Barack Obama embraced the ideology of the Republican Party and was running on our platform (and had more experience!) I would gladly support him. But
Barack Obama is
not a conservative Republican, he is a liberal Democrat and therefore as such, he will not have my vote -
Senator McCain will.
Other than that, the experience was on the whole very positive, we gained several new members including some younger and more civic-minded ones and this was very good news. The local party here has been in a slow, steady decline for several years and new blood is always welcome. It was also cool to walk around and just take in the festive air of the fair itself and have people give me a friendly smile and a thumbs up when they would see me coming in my Ronald Reagan t-shirt with a big Bush and a big
McCain pin on. It is a good thing to know there are others who affirm what you are doing.
I also took the opportunity to man the booth while 2 of our local candidates were there. Our incumbent state assemblyman Don Friske and our challenger for the state senate,
Tom Tiffany. Don's democratic opponent was there the same evening and it was the 'battle of the balloons'. Don and his challenger were both handing out balloons and any parent with a kid will stop by and get a balloon for their kid . . . because it is a balloon. As Don would hand out balloons,
Tom would hand out sport schedules. It was a very efficient set up.
Hopefully this fall as we get closer to the election we will see more of a battle of ideas.
Jim
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